[Mailman-Users] Cron has issues with gate_news

[Mark Sapiro]

On 10/13/2016 08:56 AM, Dominik Hoffmann wrote:
> Another observation:
> 
> 4. Moving the Crontab from root to _mailman had no effect.


Good you moved it, but see below.


>> On Oct 13, 2016, at 11:43 AM, Dominik Hoffmann <dhoffmann at uwalumni.com> wrote:
>>
>> There are still a few of things to mop up, after an otherwise successful installation of Mailman on OS X El Capitan with Server 5.2.
>>
>> Every 5 min my admin user account on the server gets an email from the Cron Daemon that has this line:
>>
>> IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/locks/gate_news.lock.ipheion.hoffmann.homeunix.net.54220.0'


cron/gate_news is trying to create the lock and has no permission to do so.


>> Here are my observations:
>>
>> 1. I currently have no file at /usr/local/mailman/locks/ whose name starts with "gate_news".


Normally, the lock would only exist during the few (milli)seconds that
gate_news was running, but in your case it isn't even created.


>> 2. My root Crontab has these lines:
>>
>> 	# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail. You can comment this one out
>> 	# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
>> 	# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
>> 	# 0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news
>>
>>   In other words, the gate_news cron job is commented out.


OK, but there is another crontab somewhere running gate_news.

Also, Mailman's cron jobs should run as the Mailman user (usually
_mailman in FreeBSD/Darwin), not as root.

Since the gate_news entry in the crontab entry you are looking at is
commented out, there must be another crontab somewhere.

You may have a system crontab in /etc/cron.d/ or another user crontab.
Note that the format of system crontabs is different. There is an
additional field between the times/days and the command for the user to
run as.


>> 3. I have run /usr/local/mailman/bin/check_perms -f, but that has had no impact.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan